LORD MACAULAY.* THE publication of a new and attractive edition

of Lord Macaulay's works would suffice, if such an indication were needed, to prove that the great historian has not lost his favour with the public. Indeed, if popularity be a test of worth, Macaulay's place among the distinguished authors of his century is still in the front rank. And it is needless to say that his reputation is based in large measure upon qualities that are likely to stand the test of time. Time, how- ever, which has destroyed so many once famous reputations, will not wholly spare that of Macaulay, who has already, and not without good reason, had to bear the brunt of much hostile criticism. Yet the public has not lost faith in him on this account, and just as Marlborough gained his knowledge of English history from Shakespeare, so does the general reader accept, for the most part without question, the view of history and of literature put forth in Macaulay's pages.

Few men of letters have been so highly favoured. Blame- less in his public career, blessed, too, with the choicest virtues in private life, his biography is one of the most attractive of volumes. Call no illustrious man of letters happy until you read his memoirs. An unskilful hand, instead of using the wealth at his disposal for the erection of a lasting and graceful monument, may expend it on a tomb. It is easier to bury a hero than to write his Life; and this fatal act has been too frequently accomplished. Sir George Trevelyan achieved a difficult task with fine taste, and his honesty as a chronicler has never been disputed. How vivid is the portrait he has drawn ! Who does not remember Macaulay's love of children and their love for him ; his intense affection for his sisters ; his delight in fun and puns; the tenderness of feeling that led him to weep over the Iliad; his passionate love of good books, and the charm he sometimes found in stupid ones like Mrs. Meeke's and Mrs. Cuthbertson's stories ; his inexhaustible flow of talk, which upon one occasion even stopped the mouth of Carlyle ; his familiarity with Richardson and Jane Austen ; his wonderful memory, which, if it failed him in the Popes, when he always got wrong among the Innocents, led him to suppose that " any fool could say his Archbishops of Canterbury backward;" and many another characteristic, strange or loveable, associated with Macaulay's name ?

And not the least of the merits that endear the man to us as well as the author is the patriotism which led him to record with passionate enthusiasm the expansive growth of England and the noble deeds of Englishmen. To him the Colonies were a goodly portion of the Mother-country, and India one of the most splendid jewels in the English crown. Macaulay was an Englishman to the heart's core, and if the manly virtues of his countrymen were conspicuous in his character, so also were some of their defects. His energy, his integrity, his independence, his love of righteousness, were perhaps not more visible than the onesidedness and the self-confidence which lessen his weight as an authority. Rhetoric is a poor substitute for truth, and although Macaulay never deliberately misrepresents, it has been justly said that he frequently manages to convey a false impression.

His love of strong contrasts and vigorous assertions often made him rash when he should have been judicial and blind when it was inconvenient to see. In composition his faults are by no means those of a careless writer, but his excess of care was misdirected :- "Whenever," says Sir G. Trevelyan, "one of his books was passing through the press, Macaulay extended his indefatigable industry and his scrupulous precision to the minutest mechanical drudgery of the literary calling. There was no end to the trouble that he devoted to matters which most authors are only too glad to leave to the care and experience of their publisher. He could not rest until the lines were level to a hair's breadth and the punctuation correct to a comma, until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence and every sentence flowed like running water."

An artifice like this was unworthy of an author who aimed to be a master of English prose. If Macaulay could not rest " until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence " it was because he had a defective ear for the harmonies of which our language is capable.

Few modern writers have taken up the pen with a memory so retentive and a mind more richly stored with knowledge. "He reads," said Thackeray, "twenty books to write a sen-

• The Life and Work:: of Lord Macaulay, " Edinburgh Edition.- Complete n 10 vole. London : Longman and Co.

tence; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of descrip- tion." He possessed, too, the inestimable advantage of being able to say clearly whatever he wished to say. In verse and in prose Macaulay carries the reader along with him. The path is "plain as way to parish church," and it is a path leading through picturesque scenes and enriched with gorgeous colour. His style has the merit of originality. "The more I think the less I can conceive," wrote Jeffrey, "where you picked up that style ; " and while it is wanting in the dignified repose and rhythmical charm of our greatest masters, its brilliancy is universally acknowledged. We may condemn the instrument as wanting delicacy of tone, or praise it for the blare of its trumpet-like notes, but in neither case can we fail to be impressed by it. This, indeed, is impossible, for Macaulay's rhetorical art allures us as effectually as the Pied-piper allured the children of Hamelin town. Again and again the echo of this wonderful style has been heard in later writers. We may hear it in Freeman, who, we are told, " hardly ever spoke of Macaulay without expressions of admiration," and we may frequently hear it in authors who, while catching some of his mannerisms, are wanting in the sterling qualities which made their master great. Another conspicuous feature in Macaulay is the power of telling a story and of making the past present. He brings his characters before us as they might be brought upon the stage. We see them, listen to them, sympathise with them, or dislike them as we never liked or hated historical characters before. The portraits drawn in his pages may not be true to the life, there may be often exaggeration in the features or a false tone in the colouring, but the brilliancy of the execution prevents us at first sight from scrutinising the fidelity of the artist. A more careful examination un- deceives us. Lord Macaulay is a great master of composition, but his style, with all its vivacious qualities, is destitute of beauty. It has no secret charm that lingers in the memory and leads the reader to turn to a favourite passage for a second perusal. Yet what admiration is due to an author who marshalls his facts with such consummate skill, and makes the procession of events move on so steadily and smoothly ! As an historical scene-painter he is probably unrivalled.

Lord Macaulay is chiefly known to the public as an historian, as an essayist, L' nd as the author of the Lays of Ancient Rome. a masterly piece of rhetorical verse for which all youthful readers, and many who are no longer youthful, are, and ever will be, grateful to him. He was an accomplished scholar, he was also gifted as an orator, and is held in high honour as a jurist, and as the author in large measure of the Indian Penal Code. Few indeed among publicists and men of letters have been more richly endowed, and it might almost seem as if fortune had heaped too many favours on his head were it not for certain deficiencies that detract from his merit.

Like smaller men, he had his intolerant and ignorant dislikes. These are evident in his remarks from time to time upon the country clergy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which are the more unworthy of him since he chiefly depreciates their social position. Charges affecting a large body of men are always difficult to con- trovert, and in a concise form no reply is possible. His portrait of Land can be estimated, and no impartial student will doubt that it wholly fails in doing justice to the Arch- bishop. Laud was a bigot in an age of intolerance, as much a bigot as Knox or Cartwright ; he was as superstitions as the pious Scotchmen who in his day were burning witches, and, like them, in the pursuit of his purpose he could be unflinching and cruel. But had Laud been the contemptible fool represented by the historian it is im- possible to believe that the King would have confided in his judgment, that Strafford would have reverenced him "more than any subject in the whole world," or that Clarendon, while admitting that he was not liked, would have added that his "learning, piety, and virtue have been attained by very few," while the greatest of his infirmities "are common to all, even to the beet men." Laud's vices are more evident to us in these tolerant days than they were to his con- temporaries. We may consider his method of defending Episcopacy atrocious, but not on that account should we ignore his strength of character and his appreciation of learning. " He was a man," says Ranke, " of comprehensive energy, which operated in all directions, and at the same time retained its ardour. With large general designs he united indefatigable attention to details." Such a man may be reasonably condemned by an historian on political or moral grounds, but is not to be despised as a " superstitious driveller," and as " a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote anything indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an old woman." Truly did Burke exclaim that "your pleasant historians should be read with caution."

We have already said that Macaulay knew how to apply his vast fund of knowledge with infinite skill, but if, as Mr. John Morley has observed, his knowledge was " thoroughly accurate," the use that he occasionally made of it deserves the stronger censure. It would be more charitable to conclude that his estimate of such men as Penn and Lord Bacon, or of King William's responsibility with regard to the Massacre of Glencoe, was due to the ignor. ance which led him to utter his splendid, brit, as we now know, unjust, philippic against Warren Hastings. As to Bacon, no student can accept the essayist's criticism, or is likely to question Dr. Samuel Gardiner's statement that Macaulay wrote of the philosopher's political life without understanding either the nature of the man or the ideas of the age in which he lived."

Macaulay won a fair portion of his fame as a literary critic, and in his estimate of men of letters we are also struck by the extravagance of his assertions, and by the prejudices which influenced his judgment. For instance, to exalt the claims of Addison, which did not need such aid, he depreciates and almost ignores the genius of Steele, who, although a careless writer, abounds in fine touches, and is a master of pathos. Apart from his own merit, too, Macaulay might have remembered that as an essayist we owe Addison to Steele. Moreover, when he writes that to find anything more vivid than Addison's best portraits we must go either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes, the warmest admirer of the Queen Anne essayist will acknowledge that such praise is out of all proportion to his merit. The three names ought never to have been brought into juxtaposition. The paradoxical and often-quoted judgment passed on Boswell as the greatest of biographers and the most consummate of fools scarcely calls for comment nowadays unless it be to express one's regret that Professor Jowett never redeemed his engagement " to undertake the vindication of Boswell as genius and as man." Few readers, by the way, from Boswell's time to our own have been more familiar with all that Johnson did and said than Macaulay ; it is therefore strange to find him writing that he has not " the smallest doubt " of Fanny Burney's Cecilia having been revised by Johnson. After giving an extract from the novel, he exclaims, " We say with confidence either Sam Johnson or the Devil." For once the critic's memory failed him. He would not have expressed this assurance had he remembered Johnson's distinct statement that he never saw one word of " the little rogue's book " before it was printed. No one can read Macaulay's biography and doubt his genuine kindliness of heart. Yet there was an occasional bitterness in his treatment of political opponents that seems to belie that virtue. Against Croker he had a strong grudge, and we do not know that Croker's feelings for him were more amiable; but it is not to Macaulay's credit that he wrote, after an attack by his opponent in the House, "See whether I do not dust that varlet's jacket for him in the next number of the Blue and Yellow. I detest him more than cold boiled veal." He did dust it, and boasted in 1831 that he had "smashed" Croker's Boswell; but it lives still, and some fifty thousand copies of the work are said to have been sold. It is well, by the way, for his own credit that Macaulay, who regarded Sir Walter Scott as "an unscrupulous partisan," declined to write about him in the Edinburgh Review, although his judgment of the "whole world's darling" could scarcely have been more unsatisfactory than Carlyle's in the London and Westminster.

Macaulay's passion for reading will make his memory dear to all lovers of good literature. "Books," Southey wrote, "are all but everything to me. I live with them and by them, and might almost say for them and in them." Macaulay's intimacy with the authors whom he loved was quite as ardent, and no one ever appreciated more fully the spirit which led Samuel Daniel to exclaim three centuries ago: "O blessed letters ! that combine in one All ages past and make one live with al' By you we do confer with who are gone, And the dead-living unto council call.

By you the unborn shall have communion Of what we feel and what doth us befall."

Yet despite the passion for books, which led Macaulay to say tbat he would rather live in a garret with a library than in a palace without one, he frankly acknowledged that he was not a good critic of literature. His merits as a lively writer are closely linked to his faults, and it may be safely said that without his faults, his merits, great though they be, would not have been so widely recognised by the public. It is so

satisfactory to the average reader to be guided by an author who sees, or thinks he sees, every object clearly, and is not troubled with doubts ; so invigorating to follow a leader who leaps every fence without a fear of the stream or bog that may await him on the other side. Life presented few difficulties to Macaulay, and knowledge had no paths which he could not traverse with a light and confident step. Yet it would be cruelly unjust to call him in any degree a charlatan. Probably

no man of letters ever laboured more steadfastly or with more ardour; the stores he accumulated were vast, his skill in using them consummate, and if in Macaulay's case years did not bring the philosophic mind, if he found no depths to fathom and no heights hitherto inaccessible to climb, his gifts as a writer, like his virtues as a man, are such as will keep his memory green in the hearts of his countrymen.